This past week we decided to participate in a new initiative called nReduce. nReduce was started by a group of entrepreneurs who felt that there was a need for a virtual incubator for startups that would be open to everyone. Incubators like Y Combinator, Seedcamp, Techstars and the like have had interesting successes, but can only impact a small, somewhat arbitrary selection of entrepreneurs. The founders of nReduce felt that there should be a more inclusive, crowd sourced version of the incubator idea, that would be driven by performance and commitment. The simple idea of nReduce is that anyone can join, but you need to ship week after week to not get kicked out. The program is administered entirely through the web (supported by weekly meetups on Tuesday nights for people to connect in person). There is no cost to join, and they do not take any equity from the participants.

Each week by Wednesday 4pm PST, the participating companies are required to submit their “Before” video, showing what they plan to ship that week, and why. By the following Tuesday, 4pm PST, you make a video to show that you did ship and what you learned. The program lasts 3 months (12 weekly cycles) with a demo day like presentation at the end. Failure to ship 2 weeks in a row gets you booted out. Kind of like a virtual Survivors meets Y Combinator, meets Alcoholics Anonymous.

Our co-founder and CTO, Sarah Allen, has dubbed them a “12 Step Program for Startups”. Out of the 600 companies that signed up, only 300 met the first requirement which was a 60 second introductory video. Our introductory startup video is here.

We’ll post various “After” success videos along the way as the weeks progress.

When we spoke to Joe Mellin, one of the founders, at last weeks Tuesday dinner, he said that they were expecting another group to drop out after the first delivery cycle. After a few weeks, they plan to link up groups of 3-4 like minded companies together as support for each other to keep shipping, and give each other encouragement and advice. An interesting note is that nReduce themselves are one of the participants, last weeks tool for submitting your “Before” video was completed an hour or so before the deadline! We’ve already met one ship cycle (whahoo!) and are figuring out what we’ll do for the ship commitment for week #2.

So far we’ve found nReduce to be a powerful tool for sharpening our focus and connecting with interesting folks that we may not have otherwise. It’s a wonderful new development in the startup ecosystem. Will Mightyverse stay on the island? Stay tuned.